


Wartime Cruising

by bluelineblues



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Post-Avengers, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:48:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluelineblues/pseuds/bluelineblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Until such time as this bird is repaired and fully operational, we will remain at Wartime Cruising."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wartime Cruising

**Author's Note:**

> The lead-in quote, characters, and settings depicted within belong to Marvel. Coherence is entirely due to the efforts of my hardworking beta Sarea. Any remaining mistakes are mine alone.

_“Sir, how does it work now? They've gone their separate ways, some pretty extremely far. We get into a situation like this again, what happens then?”_

_“They'll come back.”_

 

Nick Fury remained at the forward view a few moments longer than his second-in-command, clearing his mind of the lingering frustration that always accompanied a conference with the World Security Council. Stuffed shirts or not, he had multiple fires to put out in the wake of the Chitauri invasion, and he needed to get to work.

He stepped up-deck to the captain's station with its four displays, flashing condition reports, repair statuses, personnel rosters, casualty lists. It had been a long few days since the moment the Tesseract first began throwing energy spikes; days that had seen thousands of miles, a nearly unceasing supply of coffee in varying levels of drinkability, and the loss of far too many good men and women to count. By his reckoning, he'd been awake for a good thirty-six hours, and that only on the strength of the nap he'd managed to snag after calling on Cap to solicit his assistance in retrieving the Tesseract.

"I have some calls to make," he informed Agent Hill, up-deck consulting with the Ops specialist monitoring the ship's structural integrity, "and I'm not drinking another damned cup of coffee unless it's absolutely necessary. I'm giving you the helm, Agent. Call me if the world goes to shit again."

Hill nodded, and stepped down to her auxiliary command station. "Should we stand down to Peacetime Cruising, sir?"

Fury looked down at his displays again, took in the system and department statuses glowing red. "Until such time as this bird is repaired and fully operational, we will remain at Wartime Cruising."

Director and second-in-command exchanged nods, and Fury left the bridge, with its busy hum of a full crew complement directing repairs and gathering information. He knew that Wartime Cruising meant longer watches and more stress on the crew, but if in fact a whole universe of unknown foes were contemplating bringing a higher form of war to Earth, SHIELD was not going to be caught with its ankles shackled _and_ its pants down. 

 

Safe behind the doors of his cabin, Fury ditched the leather trench but kept the holster rig. He desperately longed to pour himself a glass full of something fiery and sleep-inducing, but he had calls to make, and no matter how tired he was he couldn't in good conscience drink while the Helicarrier ran on alert. So he reluctantly made some kind of tea that Romanoff swore by, and called up his status reports on the wall display. 

He reached out a hand to the comms panel, entering a department code, then tabbed the soft key, patching the call to his earpiece.

_Beep. Beep._

"Medical, Julian."

"Corpsman? This is the Director. I need to speak with Chief Anderson."

"Dr. Anderson is still in surgery, sir." Anderson had trained her support staff appropriately, then - the corpsman sounded calm and competent, even in the face of sustained casualties and the very real possibility of a Helicarrier crash. "I will have her return your call the moment she's available."

"Thank you, Corpsman. How full is Medical at this moment?"

A pause. "Most injuries have been treat-and-release, sir. We have three bays clear at present."

"Understood. Have Anderson call me the moment she steps out of the OR."

"Yes, sir."

Fury cut the connection with Medical, staring at the casualty report. Corpsman Julian had been right about most of the sustained injuries being treat-and-release. Cuts and abrasions from the unexpected dual engine failure and resultant loss of altitude had in many cases been treated at or near the duty stations where they'd occurred, and those requiring stitches, x-rays, or other advanced treatment measures had by this time had their treatment completed and been released to quarters for the required period of rest before returning to duty.

That left the beds and bays in Medical available for the crew members with stab wounds. Gunshot wounds. Arrows and -- He cut off that line of thinking abruptly. SHIELD had recruited some of the highest-skilled surgeons and specialists in the field of medicine; they were on this bird, down in the operating rooms, working to save every soul they could. 

Anderson would call when she could. He needed to let her and her staff do their jobs.

Fury tapped the display, dragging the casualty report over to the far side of the screen. With additional taps, he called up the live security feed from the cameras that remained intact at the Goldstone facility, and the Helicarrier's operational status and damage reports.

The view from the security cameras was sobering.

All that remained of the bustling facility where NASA and SHIELD had worked in tandem on the Joint Dark Energy Mission was a handful of smaller outbuildings, and of the large satellite antenna array only five dishes remained standing. The rest was a crater, a gaping wound in the earth, ringed with small clusters of people and vehicles where the search and rescue teams still worked to locate survivors, or as was more often the case now, recover those who had perished. 

The collaboration between NASA and SHIELD on the JDEM had been a landmark success; you had to go back decades to find an instance in history where two governmental entities had functioned reasonably well together. The cost of rebuilding the facility was going to be astronomical, and Fury didn't know whether there was even a point in resuming work on the joint mission with the cornerstone of that work now on the far side of the universe. That was a conversation that he was going to have to have with NASA, and with Drs. Selvig and Foster. Agent Romanoff had indicated in her report that Dr. Selvig had been freed from Loki's thrall, but it was a conversation that would wait. He wasn't going to tie up comms until he'd heard from Anderson.

He closed the security camera feed and glanced over the operational status reports. Engine 3 had lost a significant portion of its housing in the explosion that had taken it offline; reconstruction of the fuselage would require a stay in a repair yard. There was no way of setting down without flooding at least some portion of the engine compartment. And it wouldn't be as simple as calling in the original manufacturers, because the main designer and contractor on this particular project was no longer in the military contracting business, and SHIELD had already asked a fair amount of Tony Stark in the last seventy-two hours.

There was an angle to play here that would get Nick Fury what he needed. He just hadn't figured it out yet.

He drank down his tea and turned his attention to the individual department status listing. The flight deck, at the top of the list, occupied his concern next. The flight deck had reported all-secure before taking to the air, but the loss-of-altitude incident had overtaxed the restraints of five of the smaller aircraft and eight support vehicles, which had gone overboard somewhere over Pennsylvania. One fighter jet had been destroyed in getting the Hulk off of the Helicarrier. Another had been obliterated in the fight between Hulk and Thor in the cargo bay. The Quinjet that Cap had shanghaied to transport himself, Barton, and Romanoff to Manhattan had been destroyed. The Quinjet that Loki had stolen to get down to Stark Tower was still unaccounted for.

Fury could feel the entangling net of budgets and bureaucracy tighten around him with every line item.

_Beep. Beep._

He snapped a hand up to engage his earpiece. "Fury."

"Director, it's Dr. Anderson."

Exhale. "Anderson. I'm not taking you away from anything pressing, am I?"

"No, sir. All the surgical teams have finished their operations, and God willing, their services won't be required again tonight."

Fury could hear the fatigue in the woman's voice. "I'm glad to hear it. I know your people must be exhausted. I was looking for an update on the casualty report." He could hear Dr. Anderson sigh at the other end of the call.

"Yes, sir. Medical teams have provided treatment to two hundred ten SHIELD personnel since the loss of altitude incident. Of those, sixty-two required emergency care. Ten of those individuals were administered to by surgical teams. Thirty-eight were treated and released to quarters with a no-duty or light-duty profile." Dr. Anderson fell silent.

Fury did the math. "We lost fourteen people."

"Yes, sir," Anderson replied. "I'm sorry, sir."

Fury slammed his hand down on his desk. More losses were inevitable, he knew, but he'd lost far too many in the crater at Goldstone. Even one more was far, far too much.

"The surgical teams may have saved a number of people from the same fate, Director. The engine technicians who got caught in the explosion have received preliminary treatment for their burns, and unless their conditions deteriorate to the point of requiring more specialized care at a ground-based burn center, they have a good chance at recovery. And we managed to resuscitate two crew members. Until they're stable and their conditions improve, we won't know for sure, but they're alive, and receiving the best possible care."

"Resusc--"

"Yes, sir."

Fury clicked off the call, leaving the captain's cabin at a full sprint.

 

He looked through the window of the isolation room, unable to process what he was seeing.

“The medical response team managed to get his heart restarted by the time they completed transport, but only just.” Anderson looked down at the chart on the isolation room status display. “He coded again on the table in the OR. We repaired the punctured lung and reinflated the collapsed tissue, made repairs to the compromised arteries in the vicinity of the wound, and stabilized the ribcage. It was ... a nightmare, Director. And a miracle that his heart was not damaged. Another centimeter to the left, and we would be having a different discussion.”

Fury spared a glance at the woman standing next to him. “You were part of his surgical team?”

“I led it.”

He reached up to clap a hand on Anderson's shoulder. “Excellent work, Doctor.”

She nodded, smiling faintly. “We're not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. We have him on a ventilator under heavy sedation, to give him the best chance of beginning the healing process. He could be in Medical for some weeks, and under a severely restricted duty profile for up to six months. That's provided his condition improves, and there are no further complications from the cardiac events.”

He nodded. “Can he have visitors?”

Dr. Anderson tapped her fingertips against the status display before them. “We'll be keeping him under sedation for a couple of days at least, depending on how he progresses. But tomorrow, if he's had a quiet night, I think I might be able to sneak you in.”

Fury nodded. “If anything changes, keep me informed.” He inclined his head toward the window and the silent, still figure on the bed beyond. “We need him.”

“Yes, Director.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hadn't intended to publish this until I had more written, but the good news out of NY Comic-Con today had me wanting to share my #coulsonlives backstory. I promise not to abandon this work!
> 
> I know that the JDEM scenes were filmed at NASA Glenn in Ohio, but with it being the "Western Division", I have located the facility that disappears into the Earth at [this location](http://www.gdscc.nasa.gov/). Nothing at all against the wonderful folks who work there; I don't really want to see your lovely facility collapse in on itself!
> 
> This is my first time writing fanfiction in almost a decade. Please feed your author. Thank you!


End file.
